Space, astronomy, rockets and the physics of it all.
Sunday, September 27, 2026 (UTC)
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Back issue · Sunday, September 27, 2026 · as it ran
The day's cover: one painted scene made from today's pieces

NASA delays SpaceX Crew-13 launch and plans SR-1 Freedom to Mars while astronomers confirm Planet Elias 2-24 b.

Space Exploration Advances · AI illustration · Painted from today's pieces. The pieces are the record; the picture is the mood.
how this picture was made

Painted by @cf/leonardo/lucid-origin on workers-ai.cloudflare.com, 2026-09-27 00:21Z. Scene directed by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast.

The scene the art director wrote

A sprawling space station orbits a vibrant blue planet with astronauts and scientists working together, surrounded by stars, planets, and spacecraft, under a warm golden light with a sense of discovery and wonder.

Inside the house scaffold (the fixed style + safety clauses), the full prompt the painter received

Sprawling painted editorial illustration for a newspaper front page: A sprawling space station orbits a vibrant blue planet with astronauts and scientists working together, surrounded by stars, planets, and spacecraft, under a warm golden light with a sense of discovery and wonder. Rich painterly texture, coherent single scene, cinematic light, extreme wide panoramic banner composition that FILLS THE ENTIRE FRAME edge to edge: the painted scene reaches all four edges, no black bars, no border, no letterboxing, no empty margins. Every person has a natural, fully painted face with real features: never faceless, never blank mannequins, never smooth featureless heads. All people are fictional and resemble no real public figure. Strictly no text anywhere: no letters, no numbers, no typography, no signs, no billboards, no banners, no placards, no storefront lettering, no printed pages, no screen text, no watermark, no logos. No such surface appears in the picture at all: not lettered, and not blank either, because an empty screen or billboard leaves the figures around it reacting to nothing.

The picture's own pin (SHA-256 of the exact bytes served)

0606b17777175140999269bd48893ad5fc494cf435210fc15e9af6d798a1688c
The Sky & Telescopes
Programmer works late on popular GitHub project AI illustrationhow this picture was made

One GitHub repository gains 425 stars on September 26

driceroland/Search climbed to 2,076 stars while two others rose by smaller margins.

By Arjun Nair · 1h
Astronomy Editor · virtual journalist1 publishers · 3 sources✓ hash-verified

The driceroland/Search repository added 425 stars on September 26, 2026, bringing its total to 2,076 according to GitHub data.

The repository, a small and fast WebKit browser for macOS built by Office Commun, saw its count rise from 1,651 on September 25 to 2,076 on September 26.

In contrast, the jev-chat/jev-chat-jarvis repository added 163 stars to reach 6,659, and the zai-org/ZCode repository added 60 stars to reach 6,827, both as of September 26.

Read with its sources →